Posh poets

Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life,
Lord Byron

The sixth Baron Byron was a notorious bon viveur, who
swanned around Europe living the dream - getting pissed, getting
laid (getting gonorrhea and syphilis were less of the dream,
obviously) and getting a rock star reputation for his poetry. He
had flings with his fellow Harrovians, is said to have shagged his
own sister and kept a huge number of animals when he lived in
abroad, including a crow, three monkeys, five peacocks, an Egyptian
crane and an eagle, which all wandered freely around the house.
Guests at his family seat Newstead Abbey were served drinks in the
skulls of dead Byrons from the family crypt - he even asked if he
could keep his pal Shelley's skull after he died. That's
friendship.

What hath night to do with sleep, John
Milton?

Is John Milton responsible for the lightsaber? Some
would say the 'flaming swords' he wrote about in Paradise Lost were
the inspiration, which would be pretty cool if George Lucas would
just confirm it (come on, George). Milton went to St Paul's,
although that was before Putney High was founded, so no one knows
which girls he fooled around with. He famously hung out with
astronomer Gallileo in Italy and published Areopagitica,
an essay on free speech that went on to influence the First
Amendment of the US Constitution. He went totally blind, but still
managed to dictate the whole of Paradise Lost. Can't keep
a good Pauline down.

Joy, joy, joy, Percy Bysshe Shelley!

Argh, it's so annoying when you put yourself on the
rack for your poetry and no one cares until you're dead. Most of
Shelley's work got rejected during his lifetime, but went on to
influence Karl Marx, Leo Tolstoy and Gandhi and generations of
poets after him- in your FACE, publishers. He blew up a tree when
he was at Eton and was said to have only attended one lecture in
his entire time at Oxford. Famously pals with Byron and Keats, he
dumped his pregnant wife to run off with
Mary-future-writer-of-Frankenstein when she was sixteen, roaming
around Switzerland and reading aloud from Shakespeare. He drowned
in a boating accident aged 29 and it's said that his friend Edward
Trelawny snatched his heart from his funeral pyre because it
wouldn't burn and gave it to Mary, who kept it in her desk.
Um…OK.

Come into the garden, Alfred, Lord
Tennyson

The wildly popular Poet Laureate, Lord Tennyson is
responsible for such commandeered phrases as 'Tis better to have
loved and lost than never to have loved at all' (take note,
broken-hearted) and 'Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and
die' (take note, life's questioners). He wrote a 6,000 line poem
when he was 12 and was so short sighted that without a monocle, he
couldn't even see what he was eating. Described by Queen Victoria
as 'peculiar-looking' and 'oddly dressed', he is buried at Poets'
Corner in Westminster Abbey.

How do I love thee, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning?

Born into a rich family on both sides, Elizabeth
Barrett was brought up in a vast Turkish-style mansion, designed by
her father, with mahogany and mother-of-pearl doors, an ice house,
a hot house and grottos. She started writing poems aged four and
following a childhood illness, went on to find laudanum and
morphine a bit too #funtimes, which not only affected her health
(bad) but may have contributed to her whacky imagination (less
bad). She married fellow poet Robert Browning, who called her 'My
little Portuguese', was an anti-slavery advocate and became so
popular, that she gave Lord Tennyson a real run for his money when
Wordsworth died and the Poet Laureate job came up.